After walking away, Matt Hamill finds new inspiration for his return to MMA at UFC 152

http://mmajunkie.comThis wasn’t one of those fake retirement deals, the kind you do out of frustration or disappointment or just to get attention. It wasn’t the forever kind either, though Matt Hamill didn’t know that at the time.

When he announced in August 2011 that he was hanging up his gloves and walking away from MMA, he was positive that he’d never be back in the cage. No way did he think that, a little over a year later, he’d be gearing up for a bout with Vladimir Matyushenko at UFC 152 in Toronto. Not a chance. He was done, or so he thought. That much was evident from the words he chose in a statement posted to his website just two days after his second-round TKO loss to Alexander Gustafsson at UFC 133.

“I just don’t have it in me to fight anymore and my last two performances have shown that,” Hamill wrote then.

And yeah, that felt true at the time, he’ll tell you now. It also looked true from where Hamill’s longtime trainer and coach Duff Holmes was standing during the Gustafsson fight. They knew how good the lanky Swede was, Holmes said, but they’d taken the fight on eight days’ notice anyway “as a favor to the UFC.” Things started off well enough. Hamill went out and fought competently, though not spectacularly in the first round.

“But looking into his eyes after that round, I could tell he didn’t want to be there,” Holmes said. “He was just going through the motions.”

So they called it quits. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time, at least to Hamill. He felt tired, he said. He felt constantly banged up, like he was shuffling from one injury to the next. He had this pain in his shoulder and the doctors were talking about surgery. The idea of getting up in the morning and going to the gym didn’t sound so fun anymore.

That was the worst part. The hunger just wasn’t there anymore. It had been replaced by the pain of nagging injuries from a lifetime spent on wrestling mats and MMA cages.

“When you’re not healthy, it’s hard to be hungry,” Hamill said.

That’s why quitting felt like the only sensible move. It was better than turning in mediocre performances against opponents who all wanted it more than he did. But Holmes didn’t believe it was the end, even if he knew he had to go along with it.

“I really had it in the back of my mind that we’d be back. I didn’t think Matt could stay away long, but I think he needed to go through the motions of walking away,” Holmes said. “He needed to get that feeling, to feel like he wasn’t that guy anymore.”

Talk to retired fighters – especially the ones who have stayed retired – and you’ll discover that this is a recurring theme. Something strange happens when they stop fighting. It isn’t just that they miss the sport more than they thought they would. It’s also that the sport doesn’t miss them quite as much as they’d secretly hoped. The sport moves on. The sport focuses its attentions on active fighters and forgets the retired ones. A career that was a work in progress becomes the answer to a trivia question.

It’s even harder when you’re a trailblazer like Hamill, the UFC’s first deaf fighter.

“He’s a hero to the deaf community, and he takes that really seriously,” said Holmes. “But it was kind of like the deaf community didn’t put him on that pedestal like they did before when he was carrying that flame for them.”

Less than a year since his last UFC fight, and already he was no longer “that guy.” Not that he didn’t find ways to fill his time. He got married, for one thing. “The Hammer,” a film about his early life and college wrestling career at the Rochester Institute of Technology, saw widespread release. He spent a lot of time at home in Utica, N.Y., “basically being Bob Vila around his house,” according to Holmes.

“But the kicker really was that I was encouraging him to get back to the gym and give back,” Holmes said. “I said, now that it’s over for you, come help out. We’ve got 20 or 30 guys fighting out of [the Mohawk Valley Mixed Martial Arts] gym right now, so get in here and help these guys out. He did and, little by little, he was coming in to coach, and then soon he was coming in to train. We saw that metamorphosis from coach back to fighter.”

By January, Hamill had begun talking about returning to the cage. He’d left on good terms with the UFC, so the door was still open. He’d rehabbed his shoulder without surgery, and his body was finally starting to feel good again. He started tugging on Holmes’ sleeve, bugging him to call up the UFC and ask about getting him a fight. He’d been retired less than half a year. Holmes told him to wait it out, to see if the fire was still there in a few months “because this is not something you can half-ass.”

“The way I look at it is like someone who gets addicted to a drug,” Holmes said. “You go to rehab, maybe you walk away after a little while, and that first week you want it back. Two months later, you’ll kill someone to get it back. That’s kind of what happened to him.”

And, of course, there is the issue of money. Hamill insists now that he’s not coming back for financial reasons, and according to Holmes he’s got savings and investments and is “actually doing pretty well … probably a lot better than most fighters outside the cage.”

At the same time, there’s no way to talk about a suddenly unretired fighter without talking about money. He goes from earning two or three big paydays a year to seeing money trickle in slowly, like everybody else. Once it took 15 minutes to make more than $50,000. Now it takes a year. Hamill doesn’t need the money, according to Holmes, but with a baby on the way this spring, it sure would be nice.

More importantly, according to Hamill, was the feeling he got from being in the gym again. Working with young fighters who had that fire in their eyes reminded him of when he’d been the same way, back when his training partners on “The Ultimate Fighter” reality show competition had to practically beg him to take it easy in practice.

“To walk into the gym and see 20 guys who aren’t making a penny just going for it and kicking ass every day, that’s got to make you think about things,” said Holmes.

One of the things it made Hamill think about was whether he’d quit too soon. Had he jumped into retirement when really all he needed was a prolonged vacation, he wondered. Did that make him a quitter?

“Walking away without getting to where I wanted to be, I feel like I let my grandfather down,” Hamill said. “… I’m finally healthy and hungry, and I got that way by taking a little break from MMA and working with the rest of the team at Mohawk Valley. Working with those guys really inspired me to want to come back. I know at 35, if I’m going to do it I’ve got to come back now.”

But that begs the question, where exactly does he want to be? Where can he be, as a fighter in his mid-30s who’s already retired once? His original return bout was supposed to be against UFC newcomer Roger Hollett, but after an injury forced Hollett from the bout he was replaced with Vladimir Matyushenko, a fellow wrestler who is six years Hamill’s senior and, with 15 years of MMA experience, a true journeyman’s journeyman.

It’s not the kind of fight that vaults you into a title shot, and even if it did, Hamill doesn’t consider his disqualification win over light heavyweight champion Jon Jones to be anything but a loss. Hamill and Holmes estimate that he could have anywhere between five and 10 fights left in him, if he stays healthy – and, according to Holmes, now that Hamill has finally learned that there’s such a thing as going too hard in practice, and that hanging sheet rock between practice sessions probably isn’t such a great idea, that’s a possibility.

But it’s hard to tell exactly what Hamill’s aiming for when he says that he hasn’t yet gotten to where he wants to be.

“I don’t know if he necessarily means winning the belt, but I think he means more being happy with what he did,” said Holmes.

“It’s not about money for me,” said Hamill. “It’s about the sport.”

The sport is still here, still very much the same as it was when he walked away from it in August 2011. Back then, Hamill knew he was finished. He knew he’d never be back, just as he knows now that he can’t wait to step into the UFC’s octagon again. What he’ll know a year from now, and where his life and his career will be by then, he can only guess.

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